What Makes a Successful Business Website If You Don’t Have Big Marketing Budgets?
If you have any kind of business today, you understand how much online presence is important if you want to grow and to prosper. Having a website is one of the first things which every business owner wants to establish because – if your business isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. Starting a website, especially if your business is new usually means you don’t have a lot of money to invest in that project from a very start or any waste of money if something goes wrong. Luckily, a stunning and functional website is possible to make with countless and cheapest website builder tools, and you don’t need a big budget.
In this article, we will talk about some practical advice on how to establish and grow your business website using free stuff and creativity.
1.  Choose the proper platform for your websiteÂ
Choosing the right platform to build your website is one of the most important things. A wrong platform may not only cause loss of money in case you must build it again from the very beginning, but it can also affect your positioning in the search engines, losing potential customers, etc.
WordPress is always highly recommended for both small and large businesses. Why? WordPress is the most popular because of its beginner-friendly environment, affordable solutions, and lots of possibilities to customize it for any kind of business – from blog to e-commerce store.
To start a website you’ll need a hosting provider and domain name. Usually hosting providers offer registration of domain names for free once you decide to establish a website. There are two things you should pay attention to – a reliable hosting provider and a proper domain name. A good, reliable hosting provider is an investment in your business’s future – it can save you. There are plenty of hosting companies with affordable hosting solutions, and it’s on you to choose the one which is good and affordable enough. Hostinger has been evaluated rather highly, so check it out. Once you find the hosting provider, register your domain name. Choose something that is connected to your business, short, catchy, easy to read, and to pronounce, and of course something that doesn’t refer to any business with similar activities.
2.  Find a functional theme relatable to your businessÂ
One thing is very important to remember: it’s not important if you don’t have a professionally designed website from the very first beginning, but how important it is to be functional and adapted for its purpose. The recommendation is to start with some themes for WordPress that you already can find or buy one of the premium themes which are also very affordable. In the beginning, choose some simple theme that will represent your business as best as possible. Avoid too many colors and complicated fonts – instead of that, pick a clean design and simple, readable font because it’s more likely this solution will be more catchy for customers.
3.  Create content of your own
Once you have established your website framework, it’s time to fill it with engaging, stunning content that your customers will love.Â
Many business owners choose to hire agencies that will provide images and content for their website, but it can be pretty expensive. Instead of that, try to make it more genuine by creating it by yourself in the name of your business. There are plenty of tools that can help you – from very useful applications for easy and fast design to tutorials that will make your copywriting skills more professional.
Even if your business grows big and you hire someone to take care of your website content, it’s useful to know how everything is working. It will help you to explain what exactly you want and what exactly it is that your customers love the most.Â
4.  Build an email list
Email marketing is one of the most popular ways to communicate with users of your website. Once they leave your website, most users don’t come back unless you have an e-commerce shop or something like that. That means that if you don’t have their email address, you’ll have no way to communicate with them.
Whether you’ll send them a newsletter or to notify them of discounts on your website, email is useful because you’ll have their attention once they open an email. Also, an email list is useful for building your audience for your future online marketing and targeting.
5.  Use social media to bring more traffic to your website
Everybody has accounts on social media which made them one of the most powerful
Start with creating social media profiles for your business where you can share content from your website. At the same time, install plugins for social media for your website and enable social media buttons that your users can easily share your content to their profiles.
One more thing: think about your business and what audience will be more engaged with: are they younger, are they all business people, or are families with kids? For example, Instagram is better for a younger audience, and LinkedIn is tailored for business connections.
6.  Take care of website speed and performance
The attention of internet users is very precious – if they have to wait for a website to load, it’s more likely they’ll go to another, faster website and never come back to you. That means that you have to be real quick to convince users to stay on your website. Sometimes it’s an internet connection, but sometimes it’s a problem with your website optimization. For the beginning, try to uninstall all plugins you don’t use, update your website theme regularly, optimize images and don’t upload any videos directly to a website. Instead of that, try some specialized websites like YouTube and Vimeo.
Summary
Growing and improving a business website with a small budget isn’t easy, but isn’t impossible. Once you learn how to work with limited resources, it will be easier in the future to decide what is good for your online presence – which things are important and which are not.
